Category: Personal

I watched from my seat as Linda Sarsour raised her fist in the air, walking towards the stage with Carmen Perez with a powerful anthem playing. At that moment my eyes began to water with overwhelming emotion. The second they began to speak at my very first Her Conference, I knew my life was going to change.

According to the website, Her Conference “is the leading career development conference for college women.”It was the sixth one and I decided, with a help from a friend recommendation, to attend for the first time.

Each keynote and panel impacted my life in one way or another. Here are a few that stood out to me:

It’s one of the many questions I have to answer every time (literally and metaphorically) when I’m submitting cover letters, filling out applications or talking in interviews to potential companies. The one question I don’t know how to answer.

It’s difficult for me to talk about myself. It’s even more difficult to pinpoint how I stand out from the crowd.

In two weeks, I’ll be turning 23 years old. I took a moment to look back at the past year and ask myself:

What have I accomplished at this point in my life?

I’ve seen a lot of people my age going through different journeys in their lives. Some are preparing for new career role, others are growing a family. We are all reinventing and changing in front of each other’s eyes.

It’s been over a year since I ditched my hair straightener, said goodbye to relaxers and took better care of my hair.

Ever since I was little, my hair has always been straight. I never embraced nor liked my curls. If you look at every picture of my life, you’ll never see a curly brown girl in any of them.

I hated my curly hair. When I looked back at the reason why, I don’t know where that hatred came from. A year later, I realized it’s been normalize my whole life that straight hair was better.

If you didn’t grow up with your hair done at the Dominican salon, straight and perfect than your mother didn’t take care of you correctly. It was standard to have long straight hair. Anything other than that was seen out of the ordinary.